U.S. MEGAFARMS USING MORE ANTIBIOTICS
Despite that overuse warnings will spread superbugs and send modern medicine back to the Dark Ages
THE use of antibiotics in animals on US factory farms is increasing despite warnings that the practice risks spreading deadly superbugs.
Figures obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the sale of antibiotics to American farms jumped from 5,559 tons in 2017 to 6,036 tons in 2018 – a 9 per cent rise.
Over the same period, antibiotic sales to UK farms dropped by 9 per cent from 248 tons to 226 tons. It comes as experts warn that the routine use of treatments on farms risks returning medicine to the ‘Dark Ages’, as bacterial resistance turns once-trivial infections into killer illnesses.
And it will deepen fears that British supermarkets could be flooded by cheap food from vast US ‘megafarms’ – where the mass use of antibiotics is widespread – as Ministers rush to strike a coveted transatlantic free trade deal.
The biggest US intensive beef farms – known as feedlots – have up to 150,000 cattle housed in outdoor pens with little or no shelter, while at least two pig farms each have an astonishing 800,000 animals. The largest US mega-dairies boast 30,000 cows.
Ministers have pledged not to undermine animal welfare, environmental and food standards with low-quality imports as they thrash out a deal with US negotiators.
But farmers and environmental campaigners were furious earlier this month when a bid to enshrine the promise into law was defeated.
‘Quite possibly we will end up in a situation where we are allowing imports of products that would not be allowed here,’ said Rob Percival of the Soil Association.
‘That could negatively affect public health.’
In comments last year before he joined the Cabinet, Environment Secretary George Eustice called animal welfare law in the US ‘woefully deficient’.
Up to a million chickens are crammed together on some farms in vast hanger-like facilities, while tens of thousands of cows are housed in dusty outdoor pens.
Most US states still allow pregnant pigs to be housed in metal ‘sow stalls’, while slaughtered chickens are sometimes washed in chlorine. US cattle farmers can use steroid hormones to speed growth by up to 20 per cent – a practice banned across the EU since 1989.
One of the six drugs routinely used – 17 beta oestradiol – is a known carcinogen, and Mr Percival pointed to evidence that meat produced using the hormone ‘increases the cancer risk to consumers’.
Nearly three-quarters of US pigs are estimated to be fed with ractopamine, which was originally used to treat asthma.
It is, however, the overuse of antibiotics on US farms that experts fear could pose one of the gravest risks to long-term public health because it threatens to boost rates of drug-resistant superbugs.
Such illnesses already account for 700,000 deaths worldwide each year. But top economist Jim O’Neill has warned that by 2050, drugresistant infections will kill an extra ten million people a year worldwide – equivalent to one every three seconds and a cost to the planet of $100 trillion.
Sales of antibiotics to British farms dropped by 50 per cent between 2014 and 2018, according to official figures analysed by Coilin Nunan, of the campaign group Alliance To Save Our Antibiotics. US farms were banned in 2017 from using antibiotics solely to make animals fatter, resulting in a 33 per cent fall in drug sales to farms from 8,356 to 5,559 tons.
But Mr Nunan said sales increased again in 2018 as farmers switched to giving large numbers of perfectly healthy animals antibiotics as a way of preventing disease.
He calculates that US livestock receive dosage levels five times higher than those in the UK.
Mr Nunan added: ‘The US already uses enormous amounts of antibiotics in farming and this increase suggests that they are replacing some of their former use of growth promoters with more routine preventative use of antibiotics.’
Meanwhile, the rush towards a trade deal could also see Britain importing more genetically modified foods.
Senior UK officials have refused to rule out whether GM food, which is widely used in the US but heavily restricted in the EU, will be on the table in any talks.
In 2019, 94 per cent of soy beans and 80 per cent of maize from the US was genetically modified and GM food does not have to be declared on labels. In contrast, all foods in the EU which contain more than 0.9 per cent of GM ingredients must say so on the packaging. Nick von Westenholz, of the National Farmers’ Union, suggested last night that low-cost US food imports could spark a ‘race to the bottom’ as the competition forces more UK farms to adopt industrial practices to survive.
He said: ‘UK farmers would be asked a question they would never want to have to answer: do they just let themselves go out of business or do they demand a lowering of their standards – the race to the bottom. Why would we want to pose our farmers that question?’
Mega-farms are already on the march in Britain. The Welsh county of Powys has 100 large-scale intensive chicken farms and 60 times as many chickens as people.
Philip Lymbery, of Compassion in World Farming, warned that crowded conditions in US-style factory farms could be a ‘ticking time bomb for future pandemics’.
Last night, a Government spokesman said the UK was renowned for its high food safety and animal welfare standards and vowed to safeguard the agriculture sector.
Woody Johnson, the US ambassador to the UK, has defended American agricultural products as ‘safe, nutritious and delicious’.
‘A ticking time bomb for future pandemics’